Carrier licenses channel from Sony on MediaFLO

LAS VEGAS--Building on Thursday’s announcement that AT&T’s delayed mobile TV services powered by MediaFLO, a subsidy of Qualcomm, are set to debut in May of this year, the wireless carrier today revealed that it has licensed a channel from Sony Pictures Television. The film company will use the service to attract customers wanting to watch feature-length films on their mobile handsets. This partnership is the first launch of a mobile phone movie network in the United States to date.

The linear channel, licensed from Qualcomm, is called PIX and will contain movies from Sony labels including Columbia, TriStar, Screen Gems and Sony Classics. Sony said it is also negotiating with other unnamed US carriers to form similar relationships. Last week’s announcement included plans to license two channels reserved specifically for AT&T over Qualcomm’s 700 MHz spectrum. Thus far, Sony is the only announced licensee.

The service will be available on LG’s Vu phone and Samsung’s Access. According to Sony, films on PIX will run for a month, with new additions coming weekly. The MediaFLO partnership builds on AT&T’s existing mobile TV offering with MobiTV. Although trailing Verizon by about 16 months, the service is designed to be competitive with the carrier’s live mobile TV offering, also powered by MediaFLO.

While Qualcomm would not release subscriber numbers, estimates put the figure of MediaFLO users only in the tens of thousands. Thus far, the mobile TV market has seen lackluster adoption. According to ABI Research, driven by anticipated 3G-network adoption and broad consumer interest, the number of mobile content subscribers is expected to grow to 462 million worldwide over the next five years.

Come May and AT&T’s launch of the service, MediaFLO will be available to 130 million customers across 55 markets, which include Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Orlando and Philadelphia. Qualcomm hopes to grow this number to 200 million potential customers by 2009. AT&T has not yet released pricing details for access to the service, but business cases envisioned include an ad-supported model or monthly subscription fee to receive the PIX channel.